Iran Slows Internet Access Before Student Protests

RiffRafff writes "Iran is at it again, pre-emptively slowing or cutting Internet access before anticipated student protests." From the article: "Seeking to deny the protesters a chance to reassert their voice, authorities slowed Internet connections to a crawl in the capital, Tehran. For some periods on Sunday, Web access was completely shut down — a tactic that was also used before last month's demonstration. The government has not publicly acknowledged it is behind the outages, but Iran's Internet service providers say the problem is not on their end and is not a technical glitch."

Comments

Have they gotten to /.?

[bucketoftruth]

Clearly if I'm getting a frist psot on /. then they've gotten to us to!

Re:Have they gotten to /.?

[h4rm0ny]

The log "in your own eye" is pretty big. Witness the near constant half-accusations in the media about Iran at the moment. The repeated "some people think the elections were rigged" claim even when the US's own research suggests Ahmadinejad won the election because he really is very popular in Iran. A sudden rush of "look at the Iranian totalitarianism" stories. The constant exaggeration and air-brushing of the protests in the media. Mousavi supporters setting fire to cars? Nothing. Police arresting people? All over the news. Ahmadinejad does something questionable? Everywhere. Any questionable behaviour by Mousavi? Never reported. Ahmadinejad blames outside forces for formenting unrest - mockery. Mentioning that the US Congress has allocated millions to supporting opposition groups within the country and that two years ago the CIA were given approval by Bush to carry out destabalisation operations in Iran (both matters of public record) - most people don't know that.

You can only have an effective democracy if the populace is informed. That's true of Iran, and it's also true of the USA. If you want to know why we're suddenly seeing news stories about Iran everywhere and outraged people appearing online everywhere, the reason is simple and very scary. The USA thinks it might get dragged into a war with Iran by Israel and wants to get pre-emptive approval by its populace. Whether or not people think the USA should go to war or not, they should at least grant or withold their approval based on the actual situation. Not "someone was censored but no, we're not giving specifics" sort of stories.

I'm going to try and outline why I think the US is doing a media war on Iran. Apologies for length, but I could write triple this quite easily.

It's news all of a sudden mostly because there's a crisis with Iran at the moment. Iran may or may not be working towards nuclear weapons. We don't know for certain. They're working toward nuclear power which they have every right to and, in fact, if they have sense, really need to develop for a number of good reasons. But there are suspicions that they are also trying to gain nuclear weapons capability. Which given the threats to them from other powers, also makes good sense for them, but they deny that they are doing this. A lot of the intelligence comes from the Israeli intelligence communities who seem pretty confident that their is a nuclear weapons program and that, although nuclear capability isn't imminent, is on the roadmap (I've heard figures like ten years passed around, but also a couple of lower estimates). Anyway, say what you like about the Israeli's ethics, they have a Hellishly effective black ops^H^H^H^H^H intelligence community. If anyone knows what the Iranian government is up to other than the Iranians themselves, it's the Israelies.

Now we don't know that they're developing nuclear weapons. But Israel is serious enough about this that they're talking about military action. Now this bit is personal opinion, but I don't think a nuclear-capable Iran would attack Israel. Why would they? It would only invite similar retribution in kind. Plus Iran hasn't initiated a war of aggression in forever. Plus they have nothing to gain in material terms. Not even in political capital as even the Palestinians don't want to see Israel suffer nuclear strikes (they just want their own state and bit less bombing, please). If Israel went to war, the Palestinians would suffer more than anyone. But what a nuclear capable Iran would mean would be that the Palestinians suddenly had a big brother that couldn't be threatened and it would change the regional power balance quite heavily. It looks like Israel wont countenance that possibility, hence the talk of pre-emptive strikes.

Now sorry for having been so long-winded in all this, and that much of it has been about Israel, but it really is the elephant in the room. The nice thing here however, is that the USA is in some ways, finally back in the roll of the good guy (which is exactly what the r

Proxification?

[skuzzlebutt]

Anyone hosting tor ports to assist? I considered, but I'm nervous about having some /b/onehead abuse my address.

Re:Proxification?

[ickleberry]

Has anyone ever got into trouble for running a tor node? Also, not everyone lives in the US, with the level of 'freedom' over there it seems like you guys should be the ones using the tor nodes, not running them

Re:Proxification?

[techno-vampire]

And how do you think this is going to help in the slightest? If all Internet traffic in and out of Iran is being slowed down, running through a proxy outside of Iran won't help because traffic to and from it will be affected just as much as everything else.

Re:Proxification?

[Loomismeister]

Um... living in the US is fantastic and we enjoy more freedom than most of the world.

Re:Proxification?

[Akira Kogami]

America has a codified freedom of speech, which is more than you can say for some Western European countries. You'll never see a game banned from sale or distribution in the United States, for example.

Re:Proxification?

[wellingj]

Or a Semi-Auto rifle banned because it look mean...

Re:Proxification?

[sznupi]

Freedom of speech? You can hardly show tits on TV.

Even politically you impose self-censorship, at the least. What were doing your news outlets when the ones in the rest of world were casting serious doubts at, say, "Iraq has WMDs"?

Slow?

[jspenguin1]

How much will this really affect communication? If I recall, the last wave of protests mostly used Twitter, which doesn't exactly use a whole heap of bandwith? I could see this affecting Youtube, but it won't stop communication.

Let's do it right this time.

[Ethanol-fueled]

I hope the protest succeeds for many reasons, one of which is to show that regime change can be beneficial and effective without overt American influence. The Iranians are tough people with long memories, and they will be as resistant to American meddling as they are to the Ayatollah.

They're one of the few countries without McDonald's' and I'd like to see them stay that way.

Re:Let's do it right this time.

[Tezcat]

If the regime controls the media well enough, any problems or threats can be described as American-sponsered.

And if any change does occur, it'd not stop sympathetic conspiracists from blaming the downfall of an Islamic state on whoever they damn well wish: The US, the UK, or a sinister cabal of Zionists.

Of course, this is discounting the major problem the anti-government Iranian students are facing; that those they oppose were revolutionary students once, ruthless ones at that, and know a few of the tricks.

Re:Let's do it right this time.

[easyTree]

If the regime controls the media well enough, any problems or threats can be described as ...

Most don't seem to comprehend that this is exactly what happens in the US.

Re:Let's do it right this time.

[Ethanol-fueled]

Your sentimentalism sickens me.

Yeah, emotions. Why can't we all be robots?!!!!!!!!

How can your anti-globalization sentiment outweigh the fact that Iran is a highly oppressive, human rights abusing theocracy?

Read the post again. I want what the people want. They don't want a 14-th century theocracy and they don't want a bunch of greedy American meddlers entrenching themselves into the political infrastructure, exploiting the people, and cheapening a proud culture.

As the song goes, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss". The Iranians are trying to prevent that vicious cycle, unlike the apathetic Americans who encourage it.

Re:Let's do it right this time.

[easyTree]

That said, I'm still free to publish views that directly conflict with those in government without fear of being locked up. That is not the case in Iran.

You make this sound like a good thing.

There's no need to prevent someone from saying or printing anything they think - most of their thoughts are already under control - if not, their readership interprets any unrecognised opinion within the framework set by big media.

How long can they make it last?

[techno-vampire]

How long do the authorities in Iran think they can keep this Internet slowdown going? Sooner or later, they'll have to let up, and when they do, there's going to be a flood of blog posts and website updates about the latest protests. Unless they cut off all Internet access forever, they can't stop it from happening, they can only delay it, and the longer they do, the worse it looks.

Re:How long can they make it last?

[bram]

The problem is that it doesn't matter how it looks.

Re:How long can they make it last?

[Beelzebud]

Yeah, if they're willing to gun down citizens in the street for protesting a bogus election, then I don't see how anyone could think they'd care at all about how they look for restricting bandwidth on the internet.

Re:How long can they make it last?

[linumax]

apparently Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represents the poor and disenfranchised in Iran

Wrong. He represents exactly the opposite. The very rich and powerful Revolutionary Guards, evident of his extremely corrupt cabinet ministers some of which are so rich that the parliament had to spend days deliberating how to give them a confidence vote and not raise questions about the way they got that obscenely rich in the first place.

If you actually followed the events instead of dreaming them up, you would have noticed there was groups of people from different all classes protesting. The poor are especially pissed of at Ahmadinejad because he promised to fight corruption, reduce inflation and get them jobs. He then became a symbol of corruption, doubled the inflation which hits the poor most and broke unemployment records.

Re:How long can they make it last?

[lwsimon]

Wow, living in the US, I don't see a parallel there at all.

"Not on their end and not a technical glitch"

[JoshuaZ]

Well, that really doesn't leave much. I give the Iranian government credit though, this is a much more subtle way of handling things and potentially more effective than more blatant crackdowns. However, I don't think this will matter much for certain types of channels. A lot of the channels used in previous protests to communicate (such as Twitter and text messages) have extremely low bandwiths. So slowing down the internet shouldn't do much. And large scale cutting will lose the more subtle element. Of course, this sort of repeated behavior should make it clear to anyone in doubt that the current Iranian government really isn't popular with the people. If they were genuinely popular, they'd have little need to try to control communication like this. The government probably remembers that the last time there was an extremely unpopular government was the Shah's regime and that was brought down by what started as student protests.

Re:"Not on their end and not a technical glitch"

[khallow]

You are aware that the US has been running terror attacks inside Iran ever since the Bush administration, right?

No, we are not aware of this. I suspect after you enlighten us, we will find that you aren't aware of any such attacks either.

Everybody needs a little revolution now & agai

[7213]

Bah,

Last death throws of a failing regime. I feel horrible for the Iranian people right now, but thank god they don't seem to be taking this lying down.

It's like the 1960's over there, a huge boom of 'youth' and a repressive establishment to fight. Here's hoping the result of this revolution is a bit more friendly then the last, but more importantly that it treats it's people better.

Re:Hub and spoke control

[grcumb]

How long before the Iranian government lays all new fiber to a central military facility and then disable the now-current fiber links? The idea being total central control to turn off the internet connection entirely or by segments from one physical location.

What makes you think they don't route everything through a central location already?

Here's an analysis of the outage immediately following the presidential election. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

First post from Iran

[noidentity]

I would have been first but I'm posting from Iran.

Do have Comcast in Iran?

[Anonymous Coward]

If so, that would explain everything.

What's their downside?

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

The same thing happens when China "cracks down." The media whines and opines for a while, but at the end of the day the rest of the world is powerless to stop these boneheads from abusing their own people. I feel for those affected, but at some point the people inside the Matrix need to do more to help themselves. Having the people outside complain really doesn't do a whole lot to make it better.

So if I'm a thug government, I know I can pretty much do what I want, especially if I have something the world wants (cheap labor/oil/etc).

Re:What's their downside?

[couchslug]

"I feel for those affected, but at some point the people inside the Matrix need to do more to help themselves."

They are too comfortable for violent revolt, or they would violently revolt.
They aren't fighting Islam, which is the root source of all their problems, they are merely wanting their piece of the Iranian pie.

I'll be impressed when they have the balls to fight like the Jihadists they face, and wear IEDs into Republican Guard facilities.

Re:Bandwidth-wasting social sites

[Beelzebud]

If Iranian ISPs are anything like the ones here in the U.S., then that means they don't have access to usenet, unless they pay a subscription for it.

Re:Everybody needs a little revolution now & a

[shutdown -p now]

Sorry to disappoint you, but the "revolutionaries" are mostly urban youth (a lot of students there, obviously, which is why you often see those). However, that's not what the majority of Iran's population is - that comes from the countryside, rural agrarian folk, and they're rather happy about mullahs and Ahmadinejad. So at worst this won't be a revolution, this will be a civil war, and if the "more democracy" side wins, it will do so against the will of the majority (can you count the bodies it takes, already?).

I very much wish for a democratic Iran, but at this point it looks as unlikely as ever.

"bread and circuses" - encourage p2p use!

[plasmacutter]

They're doing it wrong.

they should encourage p2p software use, increase the bandwidth, then everyone will stay home watching lost or house.

there's a guy named sun yat-sen

[circletimessquare]

he was an exile, an expatriot. he gathered financial support and philosophical encouragement from ideas outside china. he spent a lot of time in hawaii, finding inspiration in things like lincoln's gettysburg address. then he went home to china, and helped overthrow the backwards qing dynasty. he is revered by both the mainland communists and the nationalists on taiwan as the father of modern china

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen

my point?

national borders are artificial constructs, and the seeds of revolution often come from outside a country, not from within it. ideology is ideology ideology: if it works in one country, it can work in another. its not like you go over the border of china or iran and suddenly you are in a magical land where human nature is fundamentally different. no: human beings are human beings. an idea that inspires someone in rio de janiero can just as easily inspire someone in hamburg. you give far too much power to something as flimsy as a tribal, arbitrary dividing line

my point is: there is very much we can do to help an angry and energized rich iranian expat community to give birth to the iranian sun yat-sen

its not just people outside the country whining and complaining. that's not all they are doing, you can be sure of that. and the iranian government knows this: they jail relatives of iranian expats they perceive as being active in fighting the illegitimate iranian military dictatorship (the ayatollah is only a pawn now):

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/05/2044243

the iranian government certainly recognizes what you do not: its not the cia, or mi-6 that is there most potent foreign enemy. it is the iranian diaspora: raising funds, keeping alive hope, influencing opinion at home

the iranian regime has heard of sun yat-sen, and they are on guard against the iranian one

you'e a pessimist, and you are ignorant

[circletimessquare]

but don't take my word for it: allow an actual iranian to complain about ill-informed american armchair analysts who spout stupidity based on crap assumptions like yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opinion/19shane.html

...

For instance, some American analysts assert that the demonstrations are taking place only in the sections of Tehran -- in the north, around the university and Azadi Square -- where the educated and well-off reside. Of course, those neighborhoods were home to the well-to-do ... 30 years ago. The notion that these areas represent "the nice part of town" will come as a surprise to their residents, who endure the noise, congestion and pollution of living in the center of a megalopolis.

People who haven't visited a city in decades are bound to give out bad directions. But their descriptions of where the protests are taking place, and why, also draw on pernicious myths of an iron correlation between religion and class, between location and voting tendency, in Iran.

This false geography imagines South Tehran and the countryside as home only to the poor, those natural allies of political Islam, while North Tehran embodies unbridled gharbzadegi (translated as "Weststruckness" or "Westernitis") and is populated by people addicted to the Internet and vacations in Paris. It is as if political Islam withers north of Vanak Square and the only residents to be found are "liberals" who voted for the opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi.

We must not assume that the engagement of members of society with their religion is uniform or that religious devotion equals automatic loyalty to a particular brand of politics. To do so is certainly to deny Iran's poor the capacity to think for themselves, to deny that the politics of the past four years may have made their lives worse -- and plays right into Mr. Ahmadinejad's dubious claim to be the most authentic representative of the 1979 revolution. Mr. Moussavi was, let's not forget, a favored son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a member of Iran's original cohort of revolutionaries, and he remains a firm believer in the revolution and the framework of the Islamic Republic.

But the United States seems able to view our country only through anxieties left over from the 1979 revolution. In the "how did we lose Iran?" assessments after the overthrow of the shah, many American intelligence agents and policy makers decided that their great mistake was to spend too much time canoodling with the royal family and intellectual elites of the capital. Commentators now are worried that, by siding with the opposition today, the United States will once again fall into the trap of backing the losing side.

But the fact is, Tehran is not the Iranian anomaly it was 30 years ago. It has become more like the rest of the country. Internal migration, not just to Tehran but to other major cities, has accelerated, driven in part by the growth of universities in places like Isfahan, Tabriz, Mashad and Shiraz, and now nearly 70 percent of Iranians live in cities. The much vaunted rural vote represents not a decisive bloc for Mr. Ahmadinejad but a minimum, one that was easily swamped by the increased turnout of city dwellers, who normally sit elections out.

And, of course, Iran in 2009 -- better yet, Iran on June 12, 2009 -- is not the same as Iran in 1979. Just as Tehran's neighborhoods cannot be fixed in time, the cultural lives of Iranians have greatly changed in the past 30 years. The postrevolutionary period has seen the expansion of education, the entry of women into the work force in large numbers, and changing patterns of marriage and even of divorce. These have all shaped Iranian society. The pseudo-sociology peddled by so many in the West would easily dissolve with a week's visit. ...

It's called manufacturing consent

[copponex]

And those of us with memories don't need a reminder.

Remember when we sent weapons to Iraq and trained their army to fight Iran? I mean, remember when we allowed them to gas the Kurds and Saddam Hussein was a secular Islamic leader stemming the tide against the Iranian Revolution and their Russian backers?

Wait, I forgot. Iraq is Evil and Saddam Hussein is Evil. They let Kuwaiti babies die in the floor in the hospital! Well, that turned out to by a lie by a diplomat's daughter. But anyway, we never did anything like that to Iraqi babies, I mean, besides starve them with an embargo for 10 years.

Remember when we invaded Iraq because they helped al Qaeda with plotting 9/11? I mean, remember when we invaded Iraq because they had WMD? I mean, remember when we invaded Iraq to liberate it's people?

Wait, what's the story again?

Re:It's called manufacturing consent

[m.ducharme]

Wait, what's the story again?

We're at war with Iran, we've always been at war with Iran. We've never been at war with Iraq.

Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth

[wmac]

Comment: A large percentage of the people support the government

Answer: Yes, 15%-18%. In every single poll on the internet I have seen almost the same number. And no, they (people) won't kill each other for it. People in Iran do not have gun and it is illegal to have it. Besides Iranian society is considered an educated community (3.5 million are in universities from which 60% are women).

Comment: The Iranians created this horrible society. It is none of our business unless they attempt to develop nuclear weapons.

Answer: No they didn't. US did a coup in Iran 40-50 years ago and overthrow their national democratic government and returned the dictator "Shah" to power. people were forced to act more aggressive to put the Shah away. An aggressive act of revolution caused more aggressive opinions.

Then a war was exposed to Iran by Iraq (Sadam) which killed almost 1million Iranians. The war was supported by most Arab countries + Europeans + USA. Arabs paid Iraq by oil and cash (around 200 billion) and Europeans and US gave them weapons etc (including chemicals for illegal chemical warfare). 50,000 Iranians are effected by chemicals provided by Europeans to Sadam.

The same Sadam used those weapons against same Arab countries a few years later.

About your comment on Nukes I should say, USA is the only country which has both built and used nukes. US has started around 50 wars in recent history. Iran has never started any war in last150 years or more.

You want to condemn the 7000 years old culture of Iran which has the oldest history of Human rights and has been one of the cultural roots of the human being and then support your own culture and people which have started almost 50 wars (in which more than 10 million are killed) ??? have you looked at the mirror recently???

Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth

[couchslug]

People judge Islam by current practice, not ancient times.

Ancient times, it bears repeating, are over, past, kaput, done, no longer applicable.

There are zero Muslim countries where one has the freedoms we expect in the secular West. Not even Turkey, praise be to Kemal Ataturk for trying, qualifies.

I've seen the best Islam can do with an unlimited budget while deployed there (before GWoT) on a friendly basis. KSA, Turkey (limited budget but more Euro influence) Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi are all places no freedom-loving person would go unless deployed or making fat contractor money. The locals are friendly (bring social skills and a smile), but Islam sucks. Imagine the US taken over by Evangelical Christians of the Fred Phelps variety. If you are like them they like you. If not...